Program: 04 | Brain Rot: Is internet addiction real?

Ange Lavoipierre: If you're one of the world's 5.5 billion internet users, and let's face it, you probably are, then you already know what I mean when I say there's something addictive about being online.

Vox Pop: I'll be watching Netflix and also watching Brain Rot at the same time. If you don't have your phone on you for an outing or something, I'm very much like, oh, where is it? I'm a bit jumpy with my phone. I get phantom notifications as well.

Vox Pop: I find myself really not wanting to scroll, but it's just kind of like an addicting thing.

Ange Lavoipierre: But how do you know when it's gone too far?

Jillian: The moment for me was when I realised that it was destroying me. I was just losing days and days and days.

Kate: I might have a night where I would just stay up till like 2, 3, 4am and then my child wakes me up at like 6.

Jillian: So I felt hypnotised, I guess you could say. Mesmerised, that'd be the word. Mesmerised.

Ange Lavoipierre: I'm Ange Lavoipierre, the ABC's national technology reporter, and this is Brain Rot, a series from Science Friction about how tech is changing our brains. Today, in episode four, the surprisingly controversial world of internet addiction.

Anna Lembke: Most people who use digital media will not go on to develop a severe and life-threatening digital media addiction, but a vulnerable subset will.

Ange Lavoipierre: At the same time, there is a live debate over whether internet addiction exists at all.

Anastasia Hronis: We don't yet have an official diagnosis that's a smartphone addiction in the way that you can have an alcohol addiction or a gambling addiction.

Ange Lavoipierre: So is internet addiction real? If it does exist, what are the signs you've got it? And how do you recover?

Jillian: Well, I was probably a late starter.

Ange Lavoipierre: This is Jillian. She's 68 now and she didn't even have home internet until 2020.

Jillian: I initially got onto the internet at the library to look up real estate, because I was thinking of moving. And even then I was aware that I seemed to sort of like lingering on it just for its own sake.

Ange Lavoipierre: She lives by the coast.

Jillian: And I used to go walking on the beach and I'd reach the point where I'd just be on the beach thinking, I want to go to the library, I want to go to the library. I want to be on the internet. I don't want to be wasting my time at the beach.

Ange Lavoipierre: By this point, she'd moved on from house hunting to social media.

Jillian: I went to a school reunion and they said, we're all on Facebook. Get onto Facebook. I got onto Facebook and just fell in love with it and became obsessed very quickly with Facebook, obsessed with my posts and how many likes or not likes they were getting, obsessed with what other people were doing. And for some reason, that just felt fantastic.

Ange Lavoipierre: So when the libraries shut during lockdown, she got Wi-Fi at home. And that's when things got out of hand. 

Jillian: It was the time factor. I thought I can't stop. I'm waking up every morning thinking I'm not going on it today. And I'd do things like put it in a drawer or force myself to not use it till lunchtime or put it in the garage.

Ange Lavoipierre: She’d always break in the end. And not necessarily for anything special either. 

Jillian: So I kept watching this short video of Elon Musk being booed at Silicon Valley. But I have no interest in Elon Musk. I have no interest in him at all. I mean, if I think about it now, how I kind of felt inside, it was this sort of glassy eyed fascination.

Ange Lavoipierre: The problem wasn't so much what she was doing online. It was just that she couldn't tear herself away.

Jillian: And then I'd go, but I'm just going to look up this one thing. And then I'd look up that one thing. And then before I'd know it, it was dark. The day was over. I hadn't fed my cats properly. I hadn't looked after myself. I'd put off going to the loo. I was showering less. Just my whole life was just diminishing to me and the screen on my kitchen bench. I was just losing days and days and days.

Ange Lavoipierre: Jillian's also a recovering alcoholic. She struggled with it in her 20s. And the way she was using tech four decades later felt familiar in the worst possible way.

Jillian: I just felt as if the gates of hell were sort of clanging shut on me and that I couldn't do anything about it. That's what was most terrifying. It was like I could see what was happening, but I couldn't stop it.

Ange Lavoipierre: In 2022, she started looking for support groups and after a few false starts, it stuck. That's where she met Kate.

Kate: Well, so the second meeting that I went to was actually an open meeting. It's called a beginner meeting. You're invited at a specific time if you want to introduce yourself. But I identified myself and where I live. And at the end of the program, this person piped up and said …

Jillian: ... I live nearby and we compared actual suburbs. It turned out we live maybe, I don't know, 20, 25 minutes drive from each other …

Kate: … which was quite amazing because a lot of the members are international. 

Ange Lavoipierre: So they took it offline.

Jillian: It's a bit of a luxury to be able to meet up with somebody for coffee, as we do every few weeks and discuss in person, face to face, rather than on technology is a really important part of my recovery, I've got to say.

Ange Lavoipierre: At 37, Kate's a slightly more typical candidate for screen overuse than Jillian was. But things only got really bad for her after her kids were born.

Kate: My child would wake me up for night feeds and then I'd be awake anyway and then I would start watching like reality television on my phone for like hours. So my child would be back asleep and I'd still be watching, I don't know, Love Island on my phone. So I think that's where it started spiralling and I got very bad mental health because of that.

Most people wouldn't necessarily know that I have that addiction, but I was functioning on extremely low amounts of sleep. So I might have one or two good nights of sleep per week, but then I might have a night where I would just stay up till like 2, 3, 4am and then my child wakes me up at like 6.

Ange Lavoipierre: And even though they're two generations apart, there are some striking parallels in their story. Like Jillian, Kate's problem wasn't the content itself. 

Kate: You know how some people get into conspiracy theories around news, I sort of got into conspiracy theories around celebrities. I remember watching like a lot of body language analysis of like Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's Oprah interview. That's just like an example. But like I would get very into the conspiracy theories of trying to speculate about what was the internal lives of famous people. The real issue was the lost time. That time was just one long whole day rather than particular days with boundaries of this is when you sleep. So I think when you dismantle all those sort of normal markers of time, then it's hard to know for me how much time I've spent on things that I would imagine that when I was in my addiction, it would have been like, yeah, well over 10, 12 hours a day.

Ange Lavoipierre: Listening to Kate and Jillian, it's easy to forget that internet addiction isn't an official diagnosis. So if the problem was real enough to take over their lives like that, then why not? 

Anna Lembke: The medical consensus, the medical literature, leading medical organisations make it very clear that digital media addiction is real.

Ange Lavoipierre: This is Anna Lembke. She's a professor of psychiatry and addiction medicine at Stanford University. And as you can hear, a big believer in the existence of internet and screen addictions. Even if psychiatry's key diagnostic manual, known as the DSM, doesn't agree.

Anna Lembke: Gaming disorder is provisional in the DSM, but social media addiction, pornography addiction, all the other kinds of internet addictions are not yet in the DSM. And actually that means very little. What it means is that the DSM has not yet caught up with the science because the science is robust that people are getting addicted to the internet, to technology, to digital media, and in some cases developing even life-threatening addictions. So I think it's just a matter of time before it's a diagnostic code in the DSM.

Ange Lavoipierre: It's not unusual for the DSM to lag behind the science. We only get a new one every five to seven years. We're currently up to DSM-5, published in 2022, and there's no timeline yet on the release of the next one. But there is a debate over whether internet addiction should be added. You can probably guess what Anna Lembke thinks about it.

Anna Lembke: Many of these platforms were made to be addictive, meaning were made to make it frictionless and easy for us to access the content and very difficult to get off because of the reinforcing nature of the medium itself. Most people who use digital media will not go on to develop a severe and life-threatening digital media addiction, but a vulnerable subset will. And it's probably going to shake out at around the same 10% that we see for addiction to drugs and alcohol.

Ange Lavoipierre: Basically, there are two broad categories of addiction. There's addiction to a substance, such as alcohol, and then there's addiction to a behaviour, such as gambling. But all addiction boils down to the same thing, our tireless quest for dopamine.

Anna Lembke: Basically when we do something rewarding or pleasurable or just simply something that our brain recognises as important for survival, our brain releases dopamine in the reward pathway. 

Ange Lavoipierre: The reward pathway is the brain network responsible for processing pleasure.

Anna Lembke: The more dopamine that's released and the faster that it's released, the more likely that substance or behaviour is to be potentially addictive for a given organism.

Ange Lavoipierre: And the reason it's called the reward pathway is that it's evolved to reward survival behaviours like eating, drinking and sex. The problem is, it evolved for a way less abundant environment than the one we currently find ourselves in.

Anna Lembke: We're all wired to reflexively approach pleasure and avoid pain, and it's what's kept us alive for most of humanity, because for most of humanity we lived in a world of scarcity and ever-present danger. The problem is that now our ancient wiring is mismatched for this modern ecosystem of overwhelming overabundance. We're wired to survive, to find food, clothing, shelter, a mate, and these are deeply conserved parts of our brains that haven't changed across species for millions of years.

But we humans have changed the environment, and as a result we're really struggling with unprecedented problems of compulsive overconsumption, even in people who are not necessarily innately or genetically predisposed to addiction.

Ange Lavoipierre: And the risk with abundance is that having too much of a good thing can effectively fry your reward pathway and set you up for a dopamine shortage in the long term.

Anastasia Hronis: What happens over time is that we build a tolerance to this sort of dopamine release and this pleasure, and so what we find is that we need more and more of a certain substance or a behaviour to get that same pleasurable experience that we're seeking.

Ange Lavoipierre: This is Anastasia Hronis. She's a clinical psychologist and the author of a book called The Dopamine Brain.

Anastasia Hronis: So there's a few key features that constitute an addiction. So one of them is salience. So this is essentially the idea that that behaviour, that thing in our life that we feel hooked to is very prevalent in our mind. We keep thinking about it and it pops into our mind in day-to-day life. So if I'm sitting working, you know, thinking about checking social media on my phone will pop into my mind. There's some degree of mood modification. So when I use a substance or I use a behaviour, my mood will change as a result of it, and we do see that with smartphones. There's some sort of tolerance that can build.

So I need more, I need to use more, I need to experience in some way more of it to feel the feeling that I'm seeking. And then also this sense of withdrawal. So when I stop using the substance, when I stop engaging in the behaviour, I feel the urge to go back to it. I feel these withdrawals. So it's the idea of if you leave your phone at home or you can't find it for a moment, you get that panic that sets in and that urge to sort of pick it up and look at it again.

Ange Lavoipierre: If you're lucky, that's not you. But if it is, Anastasia says you're not alone.

Anastasia Hronis: What we see clinically is very much patterns and features of someone who might be addicted to a smartphone that are very similar to someone who might be addicted to something else that we can diagnose. So it's not yet a diagnosable condition, but the evidence emerging is certainly telling us that children, teens and adults can certainly become hooked and experience some sort of harm as a result of using their phone.

Ange Lavoipierre: Of course, there's another argument that the science doesn't stack up just yet.

Dar Meshi: I think it's too early to tell right now.

Ange Lavoipierre: Dar Meshi is an associate professor at Michigan State University specialising in behavioural addictions and social media use.

Dar Meshi: There really aren't that many studies that have been done. First of all, it's hard to just measure social media use. Some of my studies, I've found that people sometimes overestimate by as much as two to three times the amount of what they're actually using when I look at the amount that they've been using it on their iPhones.

Ange Lavoipierre: Then there's the question of what we're actually doing online, which is an important one to answer because a video chat with your mum is substantially different to doom scrolling on TikTok. But the research doesn't always make a distinction.

Dar Meshi: I do think that there needs to be a much more nuanced take on it, understanding also as well what people are doing on the platforms because there is some research indicating that you can use social media one way and not have a problem and actually get lots of benefits, but you can use social media another way, then you actually have more negative effects of social media.

Ange Lavoipierre: Dar also says the jury is still out as to whether social media is actually causing all the harm it's often blamed for.

Dar Meshi: It could be that the problematic social media use is driving the mood disorder symptoms, but it could also be the other way around that someone has higher anxiety symptoms or higher depressive symptoms and as a result, they then develop more problematic social media use.

Anastasia Hronis: The research is almost in that state of really trying to define what it is to have a phone addiction and it's not necessarily the phone itself, but the apps specifically. So is it a phone addiction? Is it a social media addiction? And what does that kind of look like, especially when we're looking at such a huge majority of the population who report that they have some sort of negative relationship with their phone? So I think in the literature and the research, we're still in those days of trying to define and figure it out so that we can maybe come up with those more clinical and official diagnoses to be able to develop official treatments for it as well.

Dar Meshi: Many technologies have been vilified when they enter popular society, like the television. You know, television, TV will rot your brain, right? Or light bulbs, right? Like light bulbs, it's not natural to have light bulbs and to be able to stay up all night. Usually there's a wave of this pushback on this technological advancement. Sometimes it's justified, other times it's not. And I do think we're in one of these stages right now where we have to do better and try to understand really what the technology is really doing.

Ange Lavoipierre: It is a growing field of research, but the results are very much still taking shape. In the meantime, people around the world are going to keep calling it addiction anyway, either because that's how it feels or maybe because the horse is already bolted and that's just what we call it now.

Dar Meshi: Someone says, oh, I'm so addicted to Instagram. They're not really addicted to it. They're just saying that they're spending a lot of time on it and maybe they think they should be spending less time on it. Someone could say that the same way someone else says, oh, I'm addicted to chocolate or I'm addicted to ice cream, right? And so I do think that there is a little bit of, yeah, this disconnect between what the research is actually showing and what the common everyday experience of people using these platforms is like.

Ange Lavoipierre: Either way, addiction is the label that's starting to stick, which means if you want to help limiting your tech use, it's probably going to come in the form of addiction treatment using existing frameworks from that field.

Hilarie Cash: I first got involved in this field of internet addiction back in the 90s when I moved up to the Seattle area and opened my private practice there.

Ange Lavoipierre: This is Hilary Cash. She's a psychologist who spent the past three decades treating what she describes as internet addiction.

Hilarie Cash: I opened that practice in 1994 and one of my earliest clients was a young man of 25 who was severely addicted to an online video game, a Dungeons and Dragons early game. So this young man had already lost a job at Microsoft because of his severe addiction. He was married, but he was in the process of losing his marriage and a second job. I, at the time, knew nothing about the internet except what I might have heard on public radio. I didn't own a computer. It really was all a mystery to me.

Ange Lavoipierre: To be fair, it was a mystery to most people in 1994. But Hilary was so interested in screen addiction after that first client that it led her to open an inpatient centre 14 years later in 2008 in order to treat more acute cases. It's called Restart and these days it's located on a rural property near a small town west of Seattle in Washington state. 

Hilarie Cash: When our clients come, they are abstinent from screens and the internet for three months or longer. And we believe that that period of abstinence, of total abstinence, is extremely important. And they are, during that time, they are learning skills, basic life skills like how to cook, how to make a bed, how to do their own laundry. Many of them did not know those basic things. And all during that time where they're getting individual therapy, they're doing lots and lots and lots of group therapy and they have time to read, to reflect, all of which is rather difficult for them. They're not used to doing anything except going online. We want them to be able to entertain themselves without the internet and connect with other people without the internet. 

Ange Lavoipierre: And if it sounds a lot like drug rehab, you're not imagining things. It's a similar model.

Hilarie Cash: The brain is going through the process that is recognized as withdrawal. And that means that they're more anxious, more irritable, more bored than they were before they came. They're not sleeping well. They are having vivid dreams, often high levels of anxiety. And so the brain is just slowly coming back to normal function.

Ange Lavoipierre: After that first intensive phase, the three month detox, Hillary's clients are instructed to join a 12-step program specifically designed for internet addiction and attend meetings twice a week. It's modeled on a more famous 12-step program. Alcoholics Anonymous. In fact, Kate and Jillian attend a version of the same program.

Kate: It came about after a huge number of attempts to rein in my technology use by myself. So I tried everything from giving my laptop to somebody, trying to get a phone that was more laggy, installing lots of blocking software on different devices, reading every single book under the sun about digital minimalism. And none of that was sufficient. And I must have put the right search term eventually and found Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous. And I did use just some of their resources off their website to start with, because while my self-esteem was at an all-time low, my social anxiety was at an all-time high. So I did not really desire to meet a bunch of strangers on an internet site. But one day I just saw that there was a meeting happening like five minutes from when it was, and it ended up being the best possible outcome.

Ange Lavoipierre: Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous, or ITAA, is pretty new. It's been around for less than a decade, but it works in pretty much the same way as other 12-step programs.

Jillian: Which is that there is somebody who's chairing the meeting that day. They have no more authority than anybody else, but they're just chairing the meeting. And then there might be some readings or a topic and people share their, essentially their experience, strength and hope. So I was sitting in this meeting, listening to other people talk about internet and technology the way I'd been sitting in AA meetings for years, listening to people talk about alcoholism and talking about alcoholism myself. 

Kate: And so over the past six months, I've been a member there attending the online meetings and it's just recovered my sense of self-confidence and also started to uncover, yeah, my sense of purpose and service in this world and just feel so much healthier about myself. 

Ange Lavoipierre: There aren't really reliable statistics on how well this kind of addiction-focused treatment actually works for internet overuse. Although Kate and Jillian clearly rate it pretty highly. Apart from anything, it's tough to measure because every person has a different definition for internet sobriety. That's less dubious than it sounds when you remember that total abstinence isn't really an option. It's 2025. You're probably still going to need an email address.

For the time being, Kate is managing to avoid celebrity gossip online.

Kate: I haven't used any video streaming, for instance, for like over three months and other things since I joined the program. So it's just like slowly tipping away at what's healthy for me, but it's still a process of discovery. You suddenly might have all of this empty space that you don't know what to do with. So like internet use was my hobby for 20 years. So I've had to find other things.

Ange Lavoipierre: Meanwhile, Jillian has been what's sometimes called internet sober for more than two years.

Jillian: I take nature walks. I certainly walk on the beach again.

Ange Lavoipierre: If anything, she's even happier outdoors than she was before.

Jillian: My love of nature has returned tenfold. I contemplate nature at a deeper level. I will, it sounds really ridiculous. I'll look at the light in leaves. I'll look at the light on the water. I'll look at individual leaves. I study nature in a way that means I see it in much more detail and much more depth than I used to see it.

Ange Lavoipierre: It's exactly the kind of activity we're evolved for, if you ask Anna Lembke.

Anna Lembke: So the time that we live in now is sometimes referred to as the Anthropocene. Anthro for human and Pocene for era that we live in. And the reason that it's called the Anthropocene is because it's the first time in the history of humanity that our actions have changed the ecosystem on such a scale that we're really living in our co-constructed niches as opposed to living in nature.

Ange Lavoipierre: But hey, apparently we're pretty resilient as a species.

Anna Lembke: I think the pendulum is already shifting. So I'm super hopeful humans are adaptable. We tend to adapt in an extreme pendulum swing. We never quite get it in the middle, but we don't stay at one extreme for very long.

Ange Lavoipierre: That's it for this episode of Brain Rot, which was made on the lands of the Gadigal and Menang Noongar people. Our producer is Fiona Pepper, our senior producer is James Bullen and our sound engineer is Tim Symonds. Next week in episode five – the final episode of Brain Rot – could you ever go internet free?

Jameson Butler: You know, something clicked and I was like, oh my God, I am wasting my life. I was kind of just sitting in my bed and wasting away. You know, I'm 14 years old and the world is so big and I've decided to just spend my whole day on the phone. I need to do something about this. It's been really nice. And it's also kind of funny that now I'm the one who's like at family dinner. I'm like, mom, get off of Facebook because it used to be Jameson, get off of Instagram.

Ange Lavoipierre: You can find and follow the podcast on the ABC Listen app. Just search for Science Friction. My name's Ange Lavoipierre. Catch you next time.